From its beginnings, one of the most popular aspects of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival was the annual panel titled, “I Remember Tennessee.” It would feature actors from Broadway to Hollywood, fellow writers, raconteurs and friends who knew him from his days living in the French Quarter. They would share stories, dispel myths, and add a few new ones, amid an atmosphere of laughs and nostalgia that said as much about New Orleans as it did Tennessee Williams.

Those panels haven’t been a part of the festival in recent years. That’s not surprising as the passage of time between Williams’ death in 1983 and today widens. Those who were his contemporaries are either aging or are no longer around themselves.

So it was particularly pleasurable that Saturday (March 21) morning’s panel on New Orleans as a theatrical setting focused as much on Williams’ life in the city and invited such stories to be retold again. It was among the most charming of the panel discussions of the 28th annual festival.

Titled “A Little Piece of Eternity Dropped Into Your Hands” (quoting a line by Blanche DuBois describing the city in “A Streetcar Named Desire"), the panel noted how crucial the atmosphere and spirit of New Orleans was to the development of Williams as an artist.

Thomas Keith, editor of Tennessee Williams works

That importance extends beyond the plays that are actually set in New Orleans, said Thomas Keith, a chief editor of Williams’ works at his publisher, New Directions.

“Throughout his entire body of work, you see the influence of New Orleans, from his first visit in 1938. It changed his entire life,” Keith said. On that arrival in the city for the first time, Williams wrote in his journal, “Here surely is the place I was made for.”

Such influence goes both ways, noted Kenneth Holditch, retired English professor and a longtime friend of Williams.

“New Orleans was created by writers and visual artists,” he said. “Sherwood Anderson once said this is a ‘city of imagination.’” Co-editor of the Library of America’s editions of Williams’ works, Holditch also is the author of “Tennessee Williams and the South.”

He also created the walking tours, a longtime staple of the Williams Festival. Today, he noted, there are so many sites around town associated with the playwright, that they can’t all fit into the tour.

He shared one oft-told story of Williams’ early days in the Quarter, a tale that would be the centerpiece of “Vieux Carre.” One of mad landladies, who seemed to perennially appear in the young writer’s life, was angered by a loud party going on in the apartment below. She poured a boiling kettle of water through the loose floorboards to end the noise.

Kenneth Holditch, longtime friend of Williams and expert on his works

“The police arrived and hauled them all off to night court,” Holditch said. That night court was held in the very building hosting the weekend’s panels, the former police station now housing the Historic New Orleans Collection’s Williams Research Center on Chartres Street.

“When Williams was called to testify, he was asked under oath whether the landlady had poured the water through the floor,” Holditch recounted. “He simply said, ‘I cannot imagine that any lady would do such a thing.’

“The landlady was found guilty and angrily asked Tennessee why he just didn’t lie. ‘Anyone could take one look at me and see that I’m no lady!’”

Such characters were new to the young artist but they would shape his vision. (That crazed landlady would inspire the landlady in "Vieux Carre," as well as Mrs. Wire in "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," which was presented at this year's festival as part of "The Hotel Plays.")

“The polarities of Tennessee Williams’ Southern identity run between the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans,” said David Kaplan, stage director and curator of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. As a city that is as much a part of the Caribbean as it is American, Kaplan also noted Williams’ incorporation of a multiracial and ethnic outlook in so many plays, incorporating the real people who made up the city.

His detailed stage directions, for example, to “A Streetcar Named Desire” open with a description of the edge of the French Quarter in 1947. There is an easy camaraderie as two women — “one white and one colored” — visit and take in the air on the building’s stoop. They are neighbors, “for New Orleans is a cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town.”

Annette Saddick, Williams scholar

Annette Saddick, who has specialized in Williams’ later works, noted how the cast of “Streetcar” includes not only black or white characters, but crosses a variety of other ethnic lines, as well, from Mexican and Sicilian immigrants. Even Stanley emphasizes his identity as a Polish American.

“It’s a full blend, an easy freedom and mix of cultures,” she said. That level of acceptance of people and ways of life in the Quarter of the day also signaled for Williams the beginnings of his own sexual awakening, Saddick noted. “In the French Quarter and New Orleans, race and sexuality, these things that have a certain code in the rest of the country, doesn’t matter.”

“Especially the French Quarter,” Holditch added with a laugh. “In ‘Suddenly Last Summer,’ Catherine says, ‘I came out in the French Quarter years before I came out in the Garden District.’”

Foster Hirsch, film expert, interviewer

Foster Hirsch, film professor and regular interviewer at the festival, noted that despite that freedom, Williams did struggle with contradictory feelings about the city, mainly the lingering effects of his staunch upbringing.

“He came from a puritanical background and could never fully get the voice of his mother out of his head.”

For those who bemoan that New Orleans is losing its makeup of the quirky characters that greeted Williams, Hirsch says, fear not.

“New Orleans is still unique. It has its strange people,” he said laughing. “And that’s coming from a New Yorker!”